Simon Graffonara

What I do & did

A mix of side projects and things I spend my free time on.

Ball-tracking camera

Tried to build an automatic camera operator for football matches. A phone recorded the pitch and streamed frames to a Python script that used YOLO to find the ball; if it got too close to the edge of the frame, the phone got nudged to re-center it. Worked well enough, but the club bought a proper system before it ever saw real use.

Home presence tracker

Small but genuinely useful: I pull the list of devices connected to the Fritzbox and show who's home on a little LCD hooked up to a Raspberry Pi — since your phone is basically you.

Incremental clicker game

Built a JavaScript clicker game where the real fun is the engine behind it: every upgrade sits in a list with a priority score that decides in what order its effects get applied to the core formula, so past decisions can keep having an impact later. For example you can pick between a data cable and an intern who physically carries hard discs between systems — the intern is faster on average, but there's a chance he trips and you lose everything.

Free time

Football, volunteer firefighting, and tinkering on small projects.

Currently

Finishing my Bachelor thesis — implementing checkpointing for ExaHyPE 2. Written in C++ and C with Python code generators, and full of the kind of questionable design decisions that come with research code. Hoping to wrap it up in the next couple of weeks.

About me

Grew up in St. Martin in Thurn, South Tyrol. Went from TFO into computer science at TU München, picking up a mix of seasonal jobs along the way.

Education

~2009 – 2014
Elementary school, St. Martin in Thurn
~2014 – 2017
Mittelschule, St. Martin in Thurn
~2017 – 2019
TFO Bruneck
First two years of technical Oberschule.
2019 – 06/2022
TFO Brixen — Informatik
Specialized in computer science; completed the Oberschule.
Since 10/2023
TU München — Informatik (Bachelor)
In the final phase now — thesis on checkpointing for ExaHyPE 2, expected to finish in a couple of weeks.

Experience

07/2022 – 09/2022
Kitchen help / dishwasher
Gastronomy, summer season.
12/2022 – 04/2023
Ticket sales & cashier
Ski lift / skipass sales, winter season.
05/2023 – 06/2023
Substitute teacher — Informatics & Mathematics
Wirtschaftsfachoberschule (WFO).
07/2023 – 09/2023
Kitchen help & allrounder
Mountain hut, second summer season.
~02/2026 – 03/2026
Substitute elementary teacher
Covered a semester-break gap right before starting the thesis.

Technical

I like getting close to the machine and I focus on features and correctness rather than design work.

C A favourite — low level, no magic.

C++ The other favourite.

Python Comfortable, plenty of experience.

Java Solid working knowledge.

SQL Good, though not tremendously deep yet.

OCaml A bit of experience, enjoy the FP side.

HTML Basics — enough to get by.

Never touched C# — just how it worked out.
I don't enjoy design work; I focus on features and behaviour.
I like optimisations and clever patterns.
Comfortable with SQL, still building deeper experience.

About this site

This little site is a Flask app, self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi at home. No framework fireworks — just Python, a couple of templates, and some hand-written CSS. The whole thing is a small gimmick, and that's the point.